Monthly Archives: July 2016

The people sequestered in their nearly meeting for 2 days in Washington and who only have to consider monetary policy in the context of a dual mandate are the smartest guys in the room?

We often hear the phrase “the smartest guys in the room.”

Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes there may be a bit of sarcasm attached to its use.

I don’t know if anyone can sincerely have any doubt about the quality of the intellect around the table at which members of the FOMC convene to make and implement policy.

While there may be some subjective baggage that each carries to the table, the frequent reference to its decisions being “data drive” would have you believe that the best and brightest minds would be objectively assessing the stream of data and projecting their meaning in concert with one another.

One of the hallmarks of being among the smartest in the room is that you can see, or at least are expected to see what the future is more likely to hold than can the person in the next room. After all, whether you’re the smartest in the room and happen to be at Goldman Sachs (GS) or at the Federal Reserve, no one is paying you to predict the past.

Maybe this week wasn’t another one of one record after another, but it was still pretty good.

Even if the market really didn’t move very much.

In this week of an FOMC Statement release and the GDP, no new positions were opened.

While sitting around and conserving cash, the S%P 500 was down 0.1% for the week.

Again, not a very impressive week, but still enough to make me happy

That’s because existing positions again bested the S&P 500, this time by an additional 0.7%, in what was really a good week.

With no new closed positions on the week closed positions in 2016 are still 6.8% higher, while the comparable performance for the S&P 500 during the same holding periods has been 1.9% higher. That represents a 267% difference in return on closed positions. As with every week in 2016, I’d be much more impressed if there were far more of
those closed positions to point toward. With such few closed positions for the year, the differential could just as easily have been in the other direction and of a similar magnitude, yet also signifying little.

I could get used to repeating this week after week.

This was another good week in what continues to be a good year, despite not opening any new positions this week.

It’s always nice to see asset values rise some more, but I still prefer to have some activity accompany the gains and this week there was plenty of activity.

It almost felt like the good old days.

This week had 3 rollovers and 3 positions had calls sold on them.

On top of those, there were 3 ex-dividend positions, so it was a fairly good week despite the market itself doing nothing of consequence.

Being still so close to at all time highs I’m not eager to put too much at risk in the chase as next week is set to begin.

The only problem is that there are no expiring positions next week and only 2 ex-dividend positions, so I’m hoping that something else will pop up.

I’d especially like to add to the list of positions with outstanding short calls written against them.

I’ve been patiently waiting for a long time for that to be the case and am happily seeing the end result of all of the hoping and crossed fingers.

Next week may be a quiet one, but if oil can reverse course, it could be the lift that the market needs to break through its recent highs and I wouldn’t mind continuing along for the ride.

Those highs weren’t really any higher, but the market did rally after its knee jerk reaction to the FOMC’s non-action, but then in the final minutes of the day, the selling hit and the market ended the day just below the break-even line.

This morning there was nothing really on tap and the futures seemed to be reflecting that case. By the time today came to its end, the market was well off from its lows, but did retreat a little bit to finally close with a small loss signifying nothing.

With yesterday’s FOMC Statement release, the expectation is that there is less than an even chance of the FOMC finally finding a reason to raise rates in 2016.

This Friday there’s a GDP release and there could be a start to the kind of data that could move the FOMC into action.

What the FOMC did do a few months ago was to leave open the possibility that they could make a decision without having a regularly scheduled meeting required to do so.

That could mean August or at anytime between meeting as we now have 5 months left to go in 2016 and the expectations for multiple rate rises in 2016 have withered.

The expectation for the remainder of 2016 is that those expectations continue to be withered, although a single rate rise wouldn’t bring much back to life.

This morning markets continued to be flat as Facebook once again showed that it’s not ready to pick up the mantle once held by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and even Apple.

While Facebook was up strongly after last night’s earnings, it isn’t a stock to move markets, as the others once could.

For now, the earnings have been good enough, but it appears as oil is again taking center stage.

Since I have 2 oil positions expiring this week, I hope that the next day does something to breathe a little bit of life back into oil.

Otherwise, it’s already time to start looking forward to the following week and hoping for even more opportunities to sell calls on some existing uncovered positions as was again the case offered yesterday.

More of that could make all of this worthwhile.

Being able to sell some more calls on another of the uncovered positions also made today a little more worthwhile, but I wasn’t able to get rollovers done for the two expiring oil positions.

Maybe tomorrow and if so, that will bring a good week to an even better end.

Those highs were really any higher, but the market did rally after its knee jerk reaction to the FOMC’s non-action, but then in the final minutes of the day, the selling hit and the market ended the day just below the break-even line.

This morning there’s nothing really on tap and the futures seem to be reflecting that case.

With yesterday’s FOMC Statement release, the expectation is that there is less than an even chance of the FOMC finally finding a reason to raise rates in 2016.

This Friday there’s a GDP release and there could be a start to the kind of data that could move the FOMC into action.

What the FOMC did do a few months ago was to leave open the possibility that they could make a decision without having a regularly scheduled meeting required to do so.

That could mean August or at anytime between meeting as we now have 5 months left to go in 2016 and the expectations for multiple rate rises in 2016 have withered.

The expectation for the remainder of 2016 is that those expectations continue to be withered, although a single rate rise wouldn’t bring much back to life.

This morning markets continue to be flat as Facebook once again shows that it’s not ready to pick up the mantle once held by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and even Apple.

While Facebook is up strongly after last night’s earnings, it isn’t a stock to move markets, as the others once could.

For now, the earnings have been good enough, but it appears as oil is again taking center stage.

Since i have 2 oil positions expiring this week, i hope that the next 2 days do something to breathe a little bit of life back into oil.

Otherwise, it’s already time to start looking forward to the following week and hoping for even more opportunities to sell calls on some existing uncovered positions as was again the case offered yesterday.